Art !Therapy

You can view the images with commentary at the LJ gallery or you can view thumbnails (with links to larger versions) and commentary in this entry.

[May 27, 2010] (Art Night 1.1)

The picture I had in my head when I was planning to go to Art Night was an explosion of black and gold, and I knew I wanted to do it in oil pastels. I did the black first and then the gold and oh yeah, pastels blend. I added some acrylic paint and declared that piece done. (Though later I shook some excess white glitter from another piece onto it.)

[May 27, 2010] (Art Night 1.2)

I did a similar explosion with blue and gold acrylic paint, which yeah also blends. I was thinking about how near the end of my most recent therapy session (two days prior) the therapist I'm seeing asked why it's so important to me to control things. I folded the piece of paper in half -- like those butterfly paintings you make in little kid art class. I folded up a piece of black construction paper into triangles and glued a bunch of them on and then also cut out a couple orange circles and glued them on as well. (The grey-blue streaks are because I had some left over from the first painting and I was just sort of messing around.)

[May 27, 2010] (Art Night 1.3)

I took a piece of black construction paper and cut out some flames out of yellow and orange paper and glued them on (yes, I was thinking about Pentecost -- the previous Sunday) and then made a swirling globe of blue and green acrylic -- and then added some white glitter (I tried using the glitter glue pen at first, but it was more glue than glitter so then I just shook some glitter onto the paint, knowing it would stick). There was a lot of empty space at the bottom of the page, so I started painting with brown. As I painted hills, I recalled the Psalmist's line "I lift up my eyes to the hills; from where is my help to come?" (from Kathryn Greene-McCreight's Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness), so after I was done I wrote that at the bottom with white pencil. Before that, I added some green to the hills and tried to make the paint blend the way I wanted it to (I had used way too much green paint it turns out, so I blotted a lot of it off with a tissue).

[May 27, 2010] (Art Night 1.4)

I made the first 3 pieces in my first hour at Art Night and then took a break and ate the dinner I had brought with me. I felt kind of done, but I also felt committed to staying the full 3 hours. I read all of Psalm 121 and took a big piece of light blue paper and wrote the first verse at the top. I didn't want to use the entire Psalm, but I wrote "the one who keeps you will not slumber" on the side. I attempted to use the glitter glue pen to draw a line under the writing at the top, but it still wasn't working that well, so I brought out the acrylics again. I had meant to just draw curvy lines to offset the writing, but it ended up making a kind of a frame. I shook some white glitter on, to make the glitter glue lines more glittery, forgetting that it would also stick to the acrylic, so I abandoned that plan partway through, but I decided I didn't dislike the glittery addition to the acrylic. Looking at the frame, I thought about Tiffany's Children Time and how if we want to see God we just need to look in the mirror.

[May 27, 2010] (Art Night 1.5)

Still thinking about Pentecost, I took out a sheet of orange paper and drew red flames on it. I tried to give them yellow flame insides, but the blending of wet paint made that challenging. I'd almost forgotten about the light blue chalk pastel when I picked up my artwork a few days later (I was partly just bored and didn't really know I wanted to do with the piece). I made curvy X's in the other empty space near the top, shook glitter onto the glue, which again stuck to the acrylic. There was empty space below the flames, and I drew a black stripe and then decided I wanted a black gauzy curtain over the whole thing, like the Temple curtain. There was a box of tulle, so I cut a piece approximately the size of the paper, ironed it flat, and stapled it to the painting. When I picked it up a few days later, the fabric had stuck to the paint in the spots where it had touched the wet paint (which it hadn't occurred to me to guard against).

[May 31, 2010] On my way home from picking up my now-dry art, I stopped at CVS and picked up various things I ~needed, and then because I have become this person, I bought a box of 96 crayons, a drawing pad, and a set of 9 glitter glue pens.

I had in my head a cross that was a purplish-grey, sort of shimmery luminous, though apparently the closest I found in the box was a purplish-pink. As I colored, I kind of appreciated the pink vulnerable flesh nature of it.

I drew a small blue figure kneeling at the foot of the cross, because I had been thinking of "how blue and tiny and redeemable everything is" (from Mary Oliver's "One") and how my best friend often talks about falling at the foot of the Cross (of how comforting that is for her).

Then I remembered that the other thing I had in mind was outlining the cross in blue glitter pen. I purposely didn't outline the cross where the figure knelt next to it, because I didn't want to separate the figure from the cross. I drew a yellowish glow emanating from the figure, and I like that it's the most solid in the patch right by the cross (I didn't do that intentionally).

The glitter pen didn't draw very thickly on one of the undersides of the cross (again, unintentionally) and I thought about what I wanted to draw connected to the cross there, and the idea of a bird's nest came to me (probably in part because I'd drawn green fields underneath the figure). Before I'd begun drawing, as I'd developed the idea of what I wanted to draw, I thought about a black crack of lightning coming at the cross (though not touching it) but I decided to use the black crayon to make baby birds instead.